In The Baffler, Jacob Silverman examines the website Sci-Hub, which is like aaaaarg for scientific research papers. Based in Kazakhstan—which shields it from US copyright enforcement—Sci-Hub collects research papers that are behind the paywalls of overpriced academic journals and makes them available to download for free. Silverman writes that websites like Sci-Hub, which exemplify the early internet dream of freely available knowledge for all, are exceedingly rare. Instead, the internet is a domain where the age-old capitalist practice of artificial scarcity persists, as illustrated by the rapacious academic journals industry. Here's an excerpt:

With little fanfare until recently, Elbakyan has created one of the web’s great free archives, joining Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, UbuWeb, and sadly, not many others. If her methods seem daring, it’s worth asking why. It could be that the tepid digital messianism of today’s surveillance capitalists has permanently routed the utopian enthusiasm of the web’s early years. Or it could be that the information economy can still be beat at its own game: superabundance ...

The panic that Sci-Hub is likely sending through the C-suites at Elsevier and Sage hopefully presages a more thorough shakeup of academic life and the bloated higher ed industry, from tuition fees to adjunct pay. But optimism alone is a cheap tonic. The convoluted economic structure of academic publishing, in which profits, rights, and control flow upward to managers and executives who have little connection to the work being performed, can be found all over the larger information economy.

On the one hand, the information economy offers us more digital content than our bleeding eyeballs could ever consume: it’s Pizza Rat videos all the way down. On the other, distributors have been remarkably successful at enforcing artificial scarcity and nudging our cultural values toward curation, packaging, and the endless hunt for virality, likes, and various boutique metrics. The myth that all manner of scrappy independent artists and writers are bootstrapping a living in the digital wilds is just that—a myth. Instead, they are competing for the attention of mainstream corporate entities, whether Big Five book publishers or YouTube ad-sharing agreements, to solidify their market standings. Even Kanye West (or at least the character he plays on Twitter) begs for debt relief from Mark Zuckerberg, our chief info overlord.

Seen this way, the newfangled technologies of digital content creation and distribution are merely tools with which we might audition for the blinkered A&R mavens who still hold the keys to the lumbering apparatus of mass consumer culture. There is no independence to be found in digital culture, only a new set of oligarchs feasting on the corpses of the old while promising that the view from the top of the meritocracy is clarifying, even humbling. So please watch this ad.